LATIN POETIC RHYTHMS. BY F. W. H. MYERS. [FREDERICK W. H. MYERS: English essayist and poet; born February 6, 1843. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow. He published his charming poem "St. Paul" in 1867, "Renewal of Youth and Other Poems" in 1882. His "Essays Modern and Classical" came out in 1885; his "Science and a Future Life" in 1893. He has been greatly interested in the speculations regarding spiritualism, and is one of the honorable secretaries of the Society of Psychical Research. He is an inspector of schools, and resides in Cambridge.] No words that men can any more set side by side can ever affect the mind again like some of the great passages of Homer. For in them it seems as if all that makes life precious were in the act of being created at once and together language itself, and the first emotions, and the inconceivable charm of song. When we hear one single sentence of Anticleia's answer, as she begins out' emeg' en megaroisin euskopos iocheaira what words can express the sense which we receive of an effortless and absolute sublimity, the feeling of morning freshness and elemental power, the delight which is to all other intellectual delights what youth is to all other joys? And what a language! which has written, as it were, of itself those last two words for the poet, which offers them as the fruit of its inmost structure and the bloom of its early day! Beside speech like this Virgil's seems elaborate, and Dante's crabbed, and Shakespeare's barbarous. There never has been, there never will be, a language like the dead Greek. For Greek had all the merits of other tongues without their accompanying defects. It had the monumental weight and brevity of the Latin without its rigid unmanageability; the copiousness and flexibility of the German without its heavy commonness and guttural superfluity; the pellucidity of the French without its jejuneness; the force and reality of the English without its structureless comminution. But it was an instrument beyond the control of any but its creators. When the great days of Greece were past, it was the language which made speeches and wrote books, and not the men. Its French brilliancy taught Isocrates to polish platitude into epigram; its German profundity enabled Lycophron to pass off nonsense as oracles; its Italian flow encouraged Apollonius Rhodius to shroud in long-drawn sweetness the languor of his inventive soul. There was nothing except the language left. Like the golden brocade in a queen's sepulchre, its imperishable splendor was stretched stiffly across the skeleton of a life and thought which inhabited there no more. The history of the Latin tongue was widely different. We do not meet it full-grown at the dawn of history; we see it take shape and strength beneath our eyes. We can watch, as it were, each stage in the forging of the thunderbolt; from the day when Ennius, Nævius, Pacuvius, inweave their "three shafts of twisted storm,"1 till Lucretius adds "the sound and terror," and Catullus "the west wind and the fire." It grows with the growth of the Roman people; it wins its words at the sword's point; and the "conquered nations in long array" pay tribute of their thought and speech as surely as of their blood and gold. In the region of poetry this union of strenuous effort with eager receptivity is conspicuously seen. The barbarous Saturnian lines, hovering between an accentual and a quantitative system, which were the only indigenous poetical product of Latium, rudely indicated the natural tendency of the Latin tongue towards a trochaic rhythm. Contact with Greece introduced Greek meters, and gradually established a definite quantitative system. Quantity and accent are equally congenial to the Latin language, and the trochaic and iambic meters of Greece bore transplantation with little injury. The adaptations of these rhythms by early Roman authors, however uncouth, are at least quite easy and unconstrained; and so soon as the prestige of the Augustan era had passed away, we find both Pagans and Christians expressing in accentual iambic, and especially in accentual trochaic meters, the thoughts and feelings of the new age. Adam of S. Victor is metrically nearer to Livius Andronicus than to Virgil or Ovid; and the Litany of the Arval Brethren finds its true succession, not in the Secular Ode of Horace, but in the Dies Ira or the Veni Creator. 1 Tris imbris torti radios, tris nubis aquosæ Addiderant, rutili tris ignis et alitis Austri. Æneid viii. 429. For Latin poetry suffered a violent breach of continuity in the introduction from Greece of the hexameter and the elegiac couplet. The quantitative hexameter is in Latin a difficult and unnatural meter. Its prosodial structure excludes a very large proportion of Latin words from being employed at all. It narrowly limits the possible grammatical constructions, the modes of emphasis, the usages of curtailment, the forms of narration. On the other hand, when successfully managed, its advantages are great. All the strength and pregnancy of Latin expression are brought out by the stately march of a meter perhaps the most compact and majestic which has ever been invented. The words take their place like the organs in a living structure-close packed, but delicately adjusted and mutually supporting. And the very sense of difficulty overcome gives an additional charm to the sonorous beauty of the dactylic movement, its self-retarding pauses, its onward and overwhelming flow. To the Greek the most elaborate poetical effects were as easy as the simplest. In his poetic, as in the glyptic art, he found all materials ready to his hand; he had but to choose between the marble and the sardonyx, between the ivory and the gold. The Roman hewed his conceptions out of the granite rock; oftenest its craggy forms were rudely piled together, yet dignified and strong; but there were hands which could give it finish too, which could commit to the centuries a work splendid as well as imperishable, polished into the basalt's shimmer and fervent with the porphyry's glow. It must not, however, be supposed that even the "Eneid" has wholly overcome the difficulties inseparable from the Latin poetry of the classical age, that it is entirely free either from the frigidities of an imitation or from the constraints of a tour de force. In the first place, Virgil has not escaped the injury which has been done to subsequent poets by the example of the length and the subject-matter of Homer. An artificial dignity has been attached to poems in twelve or twenty-four books, and authors have been incited to tell needlessly long stories in order to take rank as epic poets. And because Homer is full of tales of personal combat-in his day an exciting and all-important thing-later poets have thought it necessary to introduce a large element of this kind of description, which, so soon as it loses reality, becomes not only frigid but disgusting. It is as if the first novel had been written by |